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Thursday, January 17, 2019

The Wilderlands and Me

Have I done this post before? Oh kinda! But I want to handle this a little different. This is kind of a combination Appendix N for my current campaign and my history with the Wilderlands. This is partly a response to friend of the blog and longtime online group player Huth's statement that he didn't quite "get" what I was going for. This post is meant to either help him get it or explain why it's difficult to get. I won't be sure which until people read it.

I first found out about the Wilderlands my freshman or sophomore year of college. I was not sure what to run for my college group so on a whim I looked up the wikipedia page for fantasy RPG settings. I saw the name The Wilderlands of High Fantasy and thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. It was so dumb I had to know why someone would name something that. In reasearching it, I found out there was a 3e version of the setting, and since that was the main RPG I ran at the time (it's the one I started with) I looked into it more.

What I found was a lot of people talking about how it was more Swords & Sorcery than a modern D&D setting. It hearkened back to the Old Days, when fantasy and science fiction were not so separate. The days of pulp magazines and bronze age four color fantasy. The days of pulp fantasy. Now at the time I actually had fairly limited experience with the actual texts involved in these statements. I was familiar with pulp sci fi and horror through my love of spaceships, the works of H P Lovecraft, and the book the Art of Imagination, which I was given for Christmas once in high school. I still treasure that book.

I was also familiar with the successors of these forms of adventure fiction, though I wouldn't have recognized the connection at the time: 1950s sci fi and mid-century adventure films. The idea of a setting that felt like that and the appeals to a nostalgia for a past that I never lived in set my mind afire. I was also intrigued by the type of gameplay it promoted that the OSR now calls the "hexcrawl," because it matched the video games I actually liked to play but I had only experienced and run fairly linear storyline stuff before this time.

So I bought the 3e box set. I also bought some of the fiction people said it resembled - most notably the Conan stories of Robert E Howard (specifically the collection with illustrations by Mark Schultz, whose art still defines the Hyborian Age to me). I also picked up the Conan movie because people said it was good, and while I found them very different I enjoyed both immensely.

The box set took some time coming in so for a long while I relied on the free Lenap chapter that was hosted online. Its jungle climate with barren hills and volcanic islands reminded me of Infant Island from Mothra, which made me love it all the more and makes it still one of my favorite areas of the Wilderlands. In fact, it is the basis for a large part of Yavana. However, this campaign ended in a TPK and by then I had gotten a hold of the box set and moved the action to the City State of the Invincible Overlord (with a brief excursion into Tarsh).

An important thing to note, then, is that the Wilderlands was in many ways my introduction to pulp fantasy, though reading Grognardia a few years later would greatly increase the amount I read. It was easier for me to deal with the fact there were weird D&D races that wouldn't normally be in Swords & Sorcery fiction because I didn't yet have a developed enough taste to recognize it. My primary science fantasy D&D alike exposure was the Might & Magic series, and that had elves and dwarves and even minotaurs and vampires in some games and you ended most of them by shooting the boss with rayguns. Heck, in some of the games the elves were even blue, which made it easier to understand the funny colored wilderpeople.

Another thing to note is that I started running the Wilderlands during my college career, where I majored in history and minored in classics (and eventually went on to get an MA in Premodern History). To the Retro Stupid Wilderlands setting I added a great deal of Pretension. The difference between the Skandiks of Croy and Ossary became many of the differences between Vikings and Saxons. The armies of the City State became late Roman in character. I knew enough about Persia to make the connections to the magic archers and name of Viridistan.

A mock cover created by Trey Causey that I think gets the tone Exactly Right

My history with the Wilderlands certainly makes it my most maximalist setting. It is a jambalaya of influences that developed as I ran the setting. My interest in "precious shithole hellscapes" developed after finding Huge Ruined Scott's original Wilderlands OD&D blog and through that the rest of the OSR. That blog is why this blog exists. The tastes I developed through reading OSR blogs led me to trying to decide from the ground up why OD&Disms would be the way they are, based on my own proclivities, which is what led to Nightwick Abbey. I don't design settings the way I did for the relatively blank slate of the Wilderlands material anymore, and I would never put elves in a Swords & Sorcery setting now.

But the Wilderlands is enough part of my D&D DNA now that I can run it without chaffing too much at its contradictions. Things are sometimes the way they are because that's the way they are in the Wilderlands. Elves and Hobbits go steal the jewel from the Tower of the Elephant.

Anyway I mentioned an Appendix N at the beginning so I should probably do one of those. This represents both what I was reading for the original campaign and what I've read since that has been incorporated into my imaginings.

Books

Geary, Patrick - Before France and Germany

Howerd, Robert E. - Almuric, Conan Series***

Jordanes - History of the Goths

Leiber, Fritz - The Sword Series***

Lovecraft, H. P. - "The Mound," At the Mountains of Madness, and other Cthulhu mythos stories.

Smith, Clark Ashton - The Hyperborean and Zothique Cycles*, "The Abominations of Yondo," "The Maze of the Enchanter"*

Moore, C. L. - Jirel of Joiry Series, Northwest of Earth Series

Tolkien, J. R. R. - The Hobbit*

Movies

Atlantis: The Lost Continent

Conan the Barbarian

Deathstalker 2 (and some of the visuals from 1 but man does 1 have too much rape).

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad*

Hawk the Slayer

Hercules in the Haunted World

Jason and the Argonauts

The Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete

Mothra*

Rodan

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad***

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger**

Comics

Conan and Savage Sword of Conan by Marvel

Conan by Dark HorseElfQuest (currently by Dark Horse)

Godzilla by Dark Horse

Video Games

Elder Scrolls - Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim

Heroes of Might and Magic 2

Might & Magic 1 - 8**

Legend of Zelda - Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time

Sid Meier's Pirates

Wizardry 6

Special Mentions: Basil Paledouris's soundtrack for Coanan the Barbarian, which I listened to while both prepping and running, and My Barbarian's "Unicorns LA" which gives me some of the same weird Nostalgia for Past Times of D&D feels.

4 comments:

That cover isn't real... but it totally should be! I aspire to run campaigns with that kind of tone. It doesn't always work out (D&D has its own demands, both as a system and as a game), but it is a worthwhile target.

I'm glad to see you comment because it acts like a kind of coda to this whole thing. I read your posts and fan supplements when I ran the game ten years ago and thought you were one of the guys who most knew what's what.

I also think that when the tone "doesn't work out" it kind of works anyway because that's what the Wilderlands is like sometimes.